Comment by duien | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duien | Hacker News Reader

I find it very interesting that in every forum where I've read comments on this article (here, BoingBoing, and Guardian) most people's first assumption is that when Cory says 'public' he means 'government'. Government is never mentioned in the article and the main parallel he draws is Wikipedia, which seems to indicate that by 'public' he means open source.

I'm not sure how well an open source philosophy could be applied to search. Most successful open source projects that I can think of are things that you download and run your own copy of, whereas search has to be centralized, to some extent. And centralized means resources -- Google has a huge number of datacenters all over the world and stores many petabytes of data. How could an open source project do something like that?

It's an interesting problem to contemplate, but I think the solution would be very difficult.

Cory is a self proclaimed socialist. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that when he says "public" he means government, just as if a right wing politician said "faith based", it would be a good guess that he meant Christian or Jewish, and not Buddhism.

Id you read what he says, the phrase is "public process", which does not suggest something run by the government. He then goes on to draw parallels with Wikipedia, which is also not run by the government.

Reading the rest of it, what he has in mind is clearly something open source and distributed, as far from centralised government control as you can get.

Still, based on the article, it's pretty clear he is looking at Wikipedia, or open source in general, rather than the State.

Could we build such a thing? It'd be as unlikely as a noncommercial, volunteer-written encyclopedia. It would require vast resources. But it would have one gigantic advantage over the proprietary search engines: rather than relying on weak "security through obscurity" to fight spammers, creeps and parasites, such a system could exploit the powerful principles of peer review that are the gold standard in all other areas of information security.

Peer review is a critical element in open source software, and less so in governance (though, theoretically, it is supposed to be).

Care to cite that? Just based on having read BoingBoing for the last however many years, all of his books, and pretty much anything else of his I come across, I would never have called him a socialist, but what do I know?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com